Right and wrong

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

News item from the Associated Press, July 4, 1999: A ring of children
as young as 7 in a small Pennsylvania community taught each other to
have sex, and a half-dozen of them have been charged in juvenile court.
The children, all students at Northeastern Middle School or York Haven
Elementary School, hid their activities from adults but readily answered
questions asked by police. Their candor was all the more troubling, said
Newberry Township Police Chief Bill Myers.

“These kids knew that what they were doing wasn’t right, but they
didn’t know it was as bad as it was,” Myers said. “There was a naivete
about the legal and moral consequences.” Six children have been charged
in juvenile court on charges including rape, involuntary deviate sexual
intercourse and indecent assault, Myers said.

Hmmmmm. Interesting and disturbing story.

The kids knew what they were doing wasn’t right, but they didn’t know
how bad it was. …

Well, how bad is it?

I mean, really? How bad is it?

I hope everyone reading this column agrees with me that it is very
wrong. It is wrong for children to have sex. It’s wrong for people to
have sex before marriage. It’s wrong for married people to have sex
outside of marriage. It’s wrong for people to have sex with animals.
It’s wrong for people of the same gender to have sex with each other
under any circumstance.

It’s wrong. It’s all wrong.

Why didn’t these kids know how wrong it is? For the same reason most
kids in America today don’t know. They’ve never been told — at least
not in any authoritative and meaningful way.

In fact, kids in America are told in a thousand ways every day that
it’s not so wrong. They’re told in movies. They’re told in television
shows. They’re told in popular music. They’re even told in school.

American kids may not know how to read or write very well, they may
not know their arithmetic or their history, but they know a lot about
sex — mechanically speaking. That’s what sex is, according to our
popular culture and our government educational system. It’s not about
love. It’s not about marriage. It’s not about intimacy between a man and
a wife. It’s not about affection and emotions. It’s not about a lifelong
commitment or devotion. It’s not about reproduction. It’s about a
physical act. They know how to put a condom on a banana. After all, what
else is there to know about sex?

And then we wonder why kids sexually victimize other kids.

If, indeed, we all agree that it is wrong for an 11-year-old kid to
have sex with a 7-year-old or a 16-year-old to have sex with an
11-year-old, just what are the rules? Would it be OK for two
11-year-olds to have sex? Two 7-year-olds? Would it be better if two
16-year-olds were having sex? Are they mature enough to make intelligent
decisions with long-term consequences?

That’s really the trouble. Americans will be appalled at the story
from Newberry, Pa., because of the age of the perpetrators and the
victims, but most won’t see that such developments are the natural
consequences of a society whose rules have become suggestions, whose
code of morality has become outdated guidelines, whose God has become
the police state.

Did you notice how the kids came clean with the police? They
recognize the “ultimate authority” when they see it. They are kids and
they want very much to be told what’s right and what’s wrong, but no one
is telling them. Instead they’re taught that God is taboo to talk about
in school or among polite company. The only law that counts is
government law. They had some vague idea that what they were doing was
wrong and smart enough to know their parents would probably object, but
they were a little surprised that what they were doing might actually be
criminal behavior.

There was a little naivete about the legal and moral consequences,
said the police chief.

Government is basically amoral. Even the best of them can’t instill
in people the desire to do what’s right. That must come from the church,
from the synagogue, the home. This is the reason the state is totally
unequipped to educate children or adults. Governments can propagandize,
indoctrinate, brainwash, but they cannot educate because the secular
state is amoral — even a secular state built on the vestiges of a
Judeo-Christian value system. About all government can do effectively is
to rule by terror, by force, by threat of violence — which is why we
must never turn to government to solve our problems except as a last
resort.

Once that Mosaic law, handed down from Mount Sinai, is no longer
accepted as coming from a higher authority than man, then the only thing
that really counts is: “What can I get away with?”

Let’s face it, folks. There’s only one reason this kind of behavior
or the kind of behavior we witnessed a few months ago in Littleton,
Colo., are wrong. And that’s because God’s law says it’s wrong. Once we
take God’s law out of the equation, then the world becomes a moral
cesspool where it is impossible to judge behavior — even our own.

I predict the behavior in Newberry, Pa., will shock Americans — for
about five minutes. It will get some attention on talk radio programs.
It may be the topic of some shows on cable TV for a few days. There may
even be a speech or two on the floor of Congress. And then it will be
forgotten. Or, worse yet, maybe we’ll find out, as I suspect, that the
stuff going on in Newberry is not really that much different from
activity going on in towns large and small all over America.

How did the police even get involved? They learned about the sexual
abuse after a sleepover 16th birthday party for one girl that was
attended by another 16-year-old girl, two 11-year-old boys and a
13-year-old boy, say police.

“Supposedly what happened was they were playing spin the bottle, and
things got beyond that,” the detective on the case related. “The story
was the bottle pointed toward one of the males, and he had to have
intercourse with one of the girls. Well, I guess this turned out to be
just the tip of the iceberg.”

After the birthday party, one of the 16-year-olds learned that one of
the 11-year-old boys had been molesting a 7-year-old neighbor and told
the victim’s mother about it.

Interesting again. The 16-year-old’s moral code told her it was OK
for 16-year-olds to have sex with 11-year-olds, but not for 11-year-olds
to have sex with 7-year-olds. So the 16-year-old blew the whistle on the
young boy. But guess who got punished with a rape conviction? You
guessed it. The 16-year-old girl. Bet she was surprised.

“I don’t think [she] realized just how much trouble she was going to
be in,” the girl’s mother said.